Excerpt from the book The Twenty-Five-Minute Teacher: Empowering More With Less in the Sunday Classroom by Taylor Halverson, Ph.D.

The hour has been cut in half. Sunday school now meets for twenty-five minutes. Elders quorum and Relief Society now meet for twenty-five minutes, every week, instead of fifty minutes every other week. The math is the same, and the math is also a lie. By the time the opening prayer ends, by the time announcements are read, by the time the class settles, a teacher walks in with closer to twenty minutes of usable time. Twenty minutes to teach, to invite, to send before the closing prayer.

The temptation is to keep the old fifty-minute lesson and talk twice as fast. The temptation is to cut a few questions and assume the rest will work. Both moves fail in the same way. They treat the shorter hour as a shrunken version of the longer one. The twenty-five-minute block is its own form, with its own architecture, and a teacher who will be faithful inside it must learn that architecture by name.

A twenty-minute lesson has five parts. Each part has a purpose. Each part has a time signature. When any part is missing, the lesson collapses into something else.

Its purpose is to give the class a reason to lean in before they have decided whether to. A question, an object, a single verse read aloud, a one-sentence story. The Hook earns the next eighteen minutes. Skipping the Hook and opening with logistics spends the first ninety seconds teaching the class that this hour will feel like every other meeting they sat through this week.

The Anchor is the single passage of scripture the lesson is built around. One block, read aloud together. The Anchor is short enough to be read in full, and rich enough to benefit the rest of the class. A teacher who tries to cover six chapters in twenty minutes has chosen to cover none of them.

The Work is where the class does the learning. Two or three layered questions that move from observation to interpretation to application. Small invitations to a neighbor, a phrase, a verse. The teacher asks. The class answers. The teacher follows up. Twelve minutes is a long time when the class is doing the work, and an impossibly short time when the teacher is doing it for them.

The Turn is the move from text to life. The teacher names the bridge between what the class has just seen in scripture and what waits for them on Tuesday morning. The Turn is short on purpose. A class that has done the Work already feels the Turn coming. The teacher names it, and the class confirms.

The Sending is the closing covenant move. A single sentence of testimony, a single invitation to act, a single quiet pause before amen. The Sending is what the class carries home, and what they recall on Wednesday when the lesson has otherwise faded.

The structure fits the class as it now is. A teacher who learns the five parts can prepare a faithful lesson in an hour. Without them, three hours of preparation still ends in a teacher walking in unsure where the class is going.

The hour has been cut in half. The calling has not. A teacher is still a witness, still a host, still the one who opens the text and invites the class to stand inside it. The shorter hour asks for a different shape, and the shape can be learned. "For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little" (Isaiah 28:10). Twenty minutes is enough for a line. A line is enough for a Sunday.

The shorter hour is a gift, once a teacher accepts its form. Five parts, twenty minutes, one line of scripture pressed into one room of Saints. Prepare for that, and the calling becomes possible again.

—Taylor Halverson, Ph.D.
Learn Deeply. Live Meaningfully. Spread Light and Goodness!

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